Why I Don't Listen to Obama Any More

Whatever would be the point?

America's Summer of Hysteria

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times op-ed page has an article written by Tim Rutten who has just returned from a month spent out of our country. Rutten lists but a few of the many conspiracy theories and regressive policy proposals now openly promulgated not just by right-wing "fringe figures", but by mainstream Republican't congressional and gubernatorial candidates, and by current Republican't office-holders. I strongly encourage your readers to read the complete piece on A25. Here are parts of Rutten's column:

..... it's hard not to conclude that hysteria is now the dominant characteristic of our politics and civic conversation.

How else to explain the fact that questions like secession and nullification — issues that were resolved in blood by the Civil War more than a century ago — have come alive again and are routinely tossed around, not just by fringe figures but by Republican officeholders and candidates?

For example ... a Tennessee congressman who opposes the recently enacted healthcare reforms and is running for governor, told an interviewer that he hopes "the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government."

... GOP candidates for statewide office in various Midwestern and Southern states are promoting the notion that states ought not to enforce any federal law not approved by at least two-thirds of their state legislators. It's as if John C. Calhoun suddenly had risen from the grave and had a talk show

In Nevada, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate has discussed abolishing Social Security and darkly mused over whether Washington's alleged overreaching may require a "2nd Amendment solution." That means guns, a prospect that could be facilitated in one state after another by an outfit called Appleseed, which holds weekend seminars whose participants are given a mix of Minuteman pseudo-history and instruction on marksmanship.

... attempts to repeal sections of the Constitution continue apace. The so-called 10thers, who want to roll back 100 years of federal law and regulation in order to assert rights under the 10th Amendment, are almost unremarkably ubiquitous in the GOP.

Candidates across the country pining for "tea party" support have endorsed repeal of the 17th Amendment, which would end popular election of U.S. Senators and return their selection to state legislatures, a step that theoretically would "restore states' rights."

The most popular such movement involves abolishing or gutting the 10th Amendment as a way to deny American citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. . . . speculates that such children actually are terrorist moles planted here to grow up as U.S. citizens as part of a long-range plot.

Nothing quite tops the anti-Muslim hysteria, which has led people to organize opposition to the construction of new mosques in places from Lower Manhattan to Temecula. One candidate for statewide office in Tennessee ... argues that the 1st Amendment does not cover Muslims.

Some inclined toward therapeutic explanations of history might attribute all this to a kind of collective post-traumatic stress syndrome engendered by the lingering, still-unresolved aftermath of the horrific events of 9/11. Others might point to the dislocating effect of electing an African American president to govern a society in which strong currents of racial anxiety still eddy beneath the surface of everyday life. Perhaps both forces act in unseen concert.

And, Rutten concludes:

Back in the early 1970s — an era whose tumult we yet may come to regard as benign — social scientists here and in Britain coined the term "moral panic" to describe what can happen when groups of people are seized by an exaggerated fear that other people or communal forces threaten their values or way of life. The scholars described those who promoted the panic's spread as "moral entrepreneurs" — a term that takes on a deep resonance when you consider the commentators and politicians who have attached themselves, and their interests, to the "tea party" and its attendant movements.

In the midst of moral panic, inchoate indignation stands in for reason; accusation and denunciation supplant dialogue and argument; history and facts are rendered malleable, merely adjuncts of the moral entrepreneur's — or should we say provocateur's — rhetorical will. As we now also see, a self-interested mass media with an economic stake in the theatricality of raised and angry voices can transmit moral panic like a pathogen.

He "nailed it", noting that today's "politics and civic conversation" is pure "hysterical moral panic" - a virulent virus that is threatening to destroy our cherished political system.

How do we fight such an out-of-control mortal virus? How do we inoculate those of our citizenry whose immune systems are engaged in fighting off this new and deadly plague?

Julian Assange: My Nomination for Nobel Peace Prize in Journalism

The statement by National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones condemned Julian Assange's Wikileaks as endangering lives of our soldiers and their mission in Afghanistan:

The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents - the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted. These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people.

What endangers lives is stupidity. What Jones is saying is that leaks endanger Obama's mission.

Personally, I believe military and intelligence services' secrecy should be maintained and guarded as a matter of national security. I am also not opposed to all wars in general. For example, the solutions to problems presented to the world by Iran and North Korea elude me. I am not a bully: I would not kick a good war in the teeth when it's already down on its knees. But I would take any and every opportunity to kick a bad war in its teeth.

Stupidity risks Lives. And it has been the height of stupidity, after all the experience of Vietnam and Iraq, to expect that a democratic and open society will indefinitely support and sustain a prolonged and costly war which does not address core national interests. The height of stupidity.

But on to support my nomination of Julian Assange who is behind Wikileaks' Afghanistan: The War Logs. (Good luck getting in!) This interview from TED will cost my readers some 19 minutes of their valuable time but it reveals Assange's contribution of document journalism is larger than Afghanistan-Nam. (I availed myself of the subtitles):

I rest my case. res ipsa loquitur.

Open Letter

Mr. President,

PLEASE: be the man of your speeches.

Please, please, please: appoint a "Truth Squad" to de-construct and explicate these utterly false, fabricated "news/stories" that frighten, inflame, and incite our fellow citizens. Sadly, we Americans no longer have a viable "Fourth Estate" to do the requisite fact-checking and the necessary investigative reporting they once did. So, YOU must confront these lies and distortions.

First impressions, especially when they appeal to our fears, are long remembered. The bigger and more outrageous the lie, the easier it is to remember. The right has learned these lessons well. They magnify the effectiveness of their machinations by repeating the lie over and over and over.

Right now, there is no one to say: "the emperor is wearing no clothes." We need truth-speakers. We need a president who stands up for his appointees, not a president so intimidated by right-wing talk-show hosts that he acts without all the facts.

Please, please, please: give up your fantasy of changing the Washington atmosphere. It is too toxic, and only getting more so as you refuse to name their destructive tactics. Republican'ts know only how to obstruct and to manipulate. They are incapable of negotiating in good faith and they have made their goal patently clear: Obama must fail. Stop colluding with them. Find your backbone...Please.

Stop giving away YOUR power to the enemy. They are winning the war to capture the hearts and minds of our fellow Americans - because our president is minimizing the damage that the right's lies are doing to our body politic.

By trying to ignore their obfuscating and reprehensible political machinations, trying to "take the high road", you have ceded the national dialogue to the right.

Please, stop trying to "look presidential". You must fight for us. This is a war for the hearts and souls of our fellow citizens, and you are on the sidelines. Get fired up, Mr. President. Mount your stallion! GO! Fight the good fight with all that is within you. NOW. PLEASE.

What Would Be Worse than Failure in Afghanistan?

Howabout Success?

James Carroll, Boston Globe columnist and author of the bestselling Constantine’s Sword, wrote the following in review of Tom Engelhardt's current book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s:

.... the Pentagon-driven mistakes, myths, self-deceptions, and crimes ... have wreaked havoc in Iraq and Afghanistan. That the American wars are proving to be as fruitless now as they were then unnecessary keeps them from rising to the level of actual tragedy....

Well, I don't know about that. Judging from Engelhardt's current perspectives, American statecraft is well on its way toward tragedy of Shakespearian proportions:

Richard Holbrooke

I've always had the greatest respect for Richard Holbrooke. His skill set in diplomacy and statecraft has proved to be unparalleled. He certainly delivered the goods during the Wars of Yugoslavian Dissolution. And I always thought he was this generation's Best and the Brightest.

But I'm not buying an 8½ year-old war from him.

Afghanization of the Occupation: Variation on a Theme

Three British Troops Are Fragged

Armed with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an automatic rifle, a rogue Afghan soldier attacked a group of British troops early Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, killing three of the soldiers and wounding four others before escaping.

The Afghan soldier was assigned to a patrol base shared by NATO troops and the Afghan National Army in the volatile southern province of Helmand, according to NATO spokespeople and Afghanistan's Defense Ministry.

Helmand is where American troops mounted a large-scale offensive earlier this year to uproot Taliban insurgents from a stronghold in the town of Marjah.

The motive for the attack in the Nahr-e-Sarraj district remained unclear.